As far as I know, UCLA is the first university in Internet2 to take this step. Congratulations!

On Thursday, there were several code commits to FreeBSD to remove IPv4 dependencies. The goal is to let the kernel be compiled without IPv4 support (one can only dream of such a day).

Also, RIPE (the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, Middle East and parts of Asia) published the slides from its meeting last month in Dubai. These were several excellent talks. Several European Internet Exchange Points showed growth in the number of IPv6-enabled customers.

Etisalat, a large Middle East telco, discussed their IPv6 deployment, which has been underway for most of the decade. They're motivated for the usual reasons: The significant increase in Internet-attached devices is exceeding NAT's usefullness. I found it interesting that they've required IPv6 support in new equipment purchases since 2001! I'm really hoping that Penn State adopts a similar policy soon.

I'm glad to see that Google (among others) is actually gathering empirical data on IPv6 usage, since there is a lot of FUD about there that IPv6 will cause all sorts of breakage. To quote Google, "It's not that broken... don't believe the FUD."

Having said that, things are not perfect. IPv6 routing is often sub-optimal (to be polite). Gert Doering presented on the state of the IPv6 routing table, as asked "Why does traffic from Germany to Germany get routed through the US and Hong Kong? He showed an example of a user in Munich accessing a server in Frankfurt. The traffic went across the Atlantic to Washington, DC, across the continental US to Chicago, then Seattle, then across the Pacific to Hong Kong, then finally back to Germany. This has got to stop.

Google also sees these sort of problems. They had an example of traffic from Virginia to Virginia being routed through Amsterdam. All of this adds significant latency to IPv6, making users disinclined to use it. Fortunately, we know how to fix the problem: We need to start filtering IPv6 routes. We've done this for IPv4 for a while, and it's time to do the same for v6.

So that's the week in IPv6. There was a lot more covered at RIPE-57. I'll blog about that later.